Immad Akhund discusses sci-fi works that shaped his business thinking: the Three-Body Problem trilogy for ethical dilemmas, Snow Crash and Ready Player One for virtual reality futures, Iain M. Banks's Culture series for post-scarcity societies, and The Expanse for humanity's expansion into space. These inform his views on innovation and long-term strategy.
Chapters
What are 3 to 4 sci-fi books that have been really impactful for you?
Let's see. I think Three-Body Problem is a great book. Actually, all 3 of the books. It's a trilogy. I think some people just stop at 1 and 2, but the 3rd one's really interesting as well. And it talks a lot about the future and it has this whole ethics thing. It's a great book. Number 2, there's both Snow Crash and Ready Player One. Which are like this kind of explore VR and these kind of like potential future that are like kind of interesting. There's a series called The Culture Series, and you really want to go beyond the first book if you're going to read that series, but it's all about like a post-abundance culture and like, what do people really care about if they have enough material things and what comes after? Oh man, there's a series I just finished reading. It's got a really good TV show attached to it as well called Expanse. The TV show is amazing. I actually read the TV— I watched the TV show first and I just finished the books recently. But just like, yeah, I think there's just a ton about like human nature and like, yeah, how like we're kind of like, I don't know, even with all we get, like we'll still fight and things like that and like how that might develop. We're like a kind of like a galactic kind of human species. I guess those are some.